Romans 8;the heart of the gospel.
Romans 8v12 comes in the middle of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, the first of the epistles and the sixth book of the New Testament. St. Paul is almost breathless with excitement, short phrases and long sentences piled on top of one another like bargains in a shopping mall. And no wonder, for here we have the core of the good news, the ignition system of the good news.Now, there is no good way to divide this passage, but our liturgical editors have split this passage so that it starts with “So then” which refers back to verse eleven. “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you.” This was a convoluted passage when it was written and for good cause.
Writing to a city with many gods, Paul wanted to be really certain that his readers did not mistake which God he was talking about. This God is rooted in history with the resurrection of Jesus, and it is rooted in the present. God, our God, the only God, is a God of choice. We see this from the beginning of human life in Genesis to the end of revelation, and supremely in the life of Jesus. Jesus says “come follow me” and some like Andrew and Matthew follow and some like the rich, young ruler don’t. And those that don’t, Jesus doesn’t chase after and remonstrate, or strike down with a thunder bolt as James and John suggest, or force to change their minds through some kind of Jedi mind control.
You see, God is love, and love can only exist with choice and choice demands consequences, not just for the chooser but for those around. It was a failing of Victorian Christianity that it tried to impose righteousness behaviour without relationship, and it is a failing of this culture that it equates freedom of choice with freedom from consequences.
Verse 14 continues this theme. Sons of God are those who are led by the Spirit. That is those who have freely chosen to follow what God has said, and how can we know what God has said unless we take time to read God’s word and listen to him both in quiet and in times of corporate worship.
So we have seen that “He who raised Jesus from the dead,” has offered not only eternal life after death but also a tendency to health in our present life, freedom of choice and his spirit living inside us. But wait, there is more.
My wife and I are Londoners. She is a genuine cockney, born within the sound of Bow Bells, and at one time one of the few thousand to actually be entitled to vote for the council of the City of London and live in the city; I have lived and worshipped for five years in London, north, south, east and west. We travelled many times from the place we met, a few hundred yards from the new Olympic stadium, on the number 30 bus to Central London, though not on a bus marked “Outright terror. Bold and brilliant.” It is therefore not casually I read to you verse fifteen” For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear.”
There is a right fear, just as there is a right pain, which keeps you from doing things that are dangerous but chronic fear and worrying will make you a slave. It could be a slave to some kind of pharmaceutical (there are both old and new testament passages that approve the proper use of drugs but they cannot fill the hole where Jesus ought to be.), it could be a slave to public opinion or to some fashion. But Jesus wants you to have freedom, and any classic car owner will tell you that freedom from roads is not true freedom.
Yet with freedom, there also comes intimacy. We cry to God not because we must but because he is close and we want to. We need to sense the awe around us, whether in the big skies, or those precious family moments, or in those days when for once everything seems to be right in the world.
Joy, health, prosperity and intimacy with the creator. Wow, it all sounds too good to be true, and of course it is. Verse 17 introduces us to the theme that to share in God’s glory we have to also be prepared to suffer with him. It‘s the difference to being on the team and being in the bleachers. Verse 18 my family knows well as my sometimes answer to the question “How are you today?” will on occasion be “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”
I did not pick the passages for today, for you can see from your prayer book that Luke 6v27 is todays gospel, and it concludes far more fittingly and boldly than I could every phrase it :......